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Françoise N. Hamlin

Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies:
Africana Studies and History
Phone: +1 401 863 3137
Francoise_Hamlin@brown.edu

Current research includes work on children and the complexities of activism during the civil rights movement.

Professor Hamlin has completed Crossroads At Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II. She is completing an edited anthology (as co-editor), Thunder at the Gate: African Americans on War and Citizenship.

Biography

Françoise N. Hamlin (Ph.D. Yale University, 2004) is the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in twentieth century African American history, southern history, U.S. history and cultural studies. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown, Professor Hamlin was a DuBois-Mandela-Rodney fellow at the University of Michigan (2004-2005), and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2005-2007). Since then she has been a Charles Warren Center Fellow at Harvard University (2007-2008), and a Woodrow Wilson-Mellon Fellow (2010-2011).

Interests

My current research includes work on children and youth during the mass civil rights movement with critical analysis on the nature of activism.

_Crossroads at Clarksdale_ (UNC Press, 2012) studies the civil rights movement in Coahoma County, Mississippi from 1951 to the present. Three points of inquiry frame this work. First, I reinstate women's roles as paramount to the successful maneuverings at the local level and I recast their own understanding of those roles in their own terms, using the trope of motherhood and motherwork to reinterpret leadership. Second, I track the movement of organizations in the local area, analyzing those that passed through and those that stayed in order to better understand when and how organizations succeed in their goals given the multitude of variables the members confronted, and I utilize my concept of flexible loyalties to describe how local people consciously used the groups to fulfill their own needs, Finally I reassess the difference that community activism and group cooperation made for the success of social programs. By ending the project at the eve of the millennium, I question the conventional periodization of the civil rights movement as has been memorialized by political, social and cultural historians. How do we calculate the success of a movement?

Degrees

Ph.D.

Awards

Selected Honors and Awards:
•Woodrow Wilson National Fellow. 2010-2011.
•Charles Warren Center Fellow, Harvard University. 2007-2008.
•Franklin L. Riley Dissertation Prize, Mississippi Historical Society. 2006.
•C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, Southern Historical Association. 2005
•Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Fellowship, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan. 2004-2005.
•Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for work in African American culture & history, Yale University. 2004.
•Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant, American Historical Association. 2003.
•Huggins-Quarles Award, Organization of American Historians. 2002.

Affiliations

American Historical Association
Organization of American Historians
Southern Historical Association
Southern Association for Women Historians (membership committee member, 2005-2007)
Coordinating Council for Women in History (graduate student representative, 2002-2004)
American Studies Association
Association for the Study of African American Life & History.

Teaching

Courses taught include:

• Rethinking the Civil Rights Movement
• Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement
• Formation of Modern American Culture
• Social Change in the 1960s
• The Black Freedom Struggle Since 1945
• Racializing Britain From World War II To The Present

Funded Research

Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, 2010-2011.
Charles Warren Center Fellow, Harvard University, 2007-2008.
Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney Fellowship, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan, 2004-2005.
Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant, American Historical Association, 2003.
Huggins-Quarles Award, Organization of American Historians, 2002.
John F. Kennedy Foundation Research Grant, 2002.
Summer Research Fellowship, I Advanced Study of Religion Institute at Yale, Pew Charitable Trusts, 2002.
Moody Grant-in-aid, The Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, 2001.